The Elegy for Strings (1952) was first performed in Belho
Horizonte, Brazil, conducted by my composition teacher, Guido Santórsola. I did
not hear that performance, but I was present when he conducted it in Montevideo
a few weeks later. To this day I recall a local critic writing that he enjoyed
this dark, brooding piece, but that it had to be impersonal, because it seemed
inconceivable to him that a fourteen-year-old boy living in Montevideo could
write such sad, dark music. The Elegy was a first in many ways for my
beginnings as a composer. It was my first published composition (by the Pan
American Union in Washington DC, which in turn led to my life-long relationship
with Peer Music publishers). It was my first work to be played abroad, with
performances at Radio France in Paris, conducted by Juan Protasi, and a New
York première at Carnegie Hall conducted by Leopold Stokowski. This is the
first recording.

Shortly after my arrival in the United States I started my
studies with Aaron Copland, and it was he who suggested the title for the
enigmatic Momento psicológico (1957). I had mentioned to Copland the motive
behind this work: “There is that crucial moment in life when you must decide
whether to make a left or a right turn, and that choice can shape your
destiny.” Copland replied: “It’s a fateful, psychological moment.” Scored for
string orchestra, there is also a distant trumpet sound –just one note–always present, sometimes whispering,
sometimes screaming.

After graduation from the University of Minnesota, and Antal
Dorati’s departure from Minneapolis, with my Guggenheim grants finished, life
became a big question mark. While driving back to New York I stopped for gas in
a small city in upstate New York, and read a newspaper announcement that on that
same evening the local orchestra was auditioning conductors. With spirit of
adventure, I called to ask if it was still possible to apply. The audition was
successful, and I became the music director of the Utica Symphony, a
semi-professional orchestra. The position came as a package with a part-time
Assistant Professorship at the local college to teach violin and composition.
This new school, part of Syracuse University, used makeshift classrooms, but at
least I had my own office, and a school library room where I could compose. It
was in this school library/cafeteria that I wrote every note of my Fantasia for
String Quartet (1960). The noise and the constant chatter failed to distract
me. I enjoyed writing this piece, on commission from the Harvard Musical
Association in Massachusetts, a contest I had won which included a première by
members of the Boston Symphony, at the Harvard Musical Association’s beautiful
salons. The première, in the spring of 1961 was a wonderful event. The next
time it was played was in Washington, DC at the Inter-American Music Festival.
I was unable to attend, but was amused by the Washington Post’s review, which
declared it an “instant hit, a veritable 1812 of string quartets.” That was not
what I had in mind at all, but I was delighted that it had communicated so
well. Later, Wladimir Lakond, the editor at Peer Music, suggested a string
orchestra version of it, with double basses added, and he published both
versions. As time passes, I still feel very close to this piece which just
poured out of my pen in less than a week.

After a short introduction that sets the mood –a folk-like
melody of melancholy nature– there follows a persistent solo violin, using
unexpected melodic and harmonic structures. This recurrent solo, a sort of devil’s
trill, is purposely out of place. The music goes back and forth in the manner
of an improvisation. The closest it comes to a set form is the recapitulation
of the solo violin section, which leads to an unexpected, driven coda. This
ending may come as a surprise, since the bulk of the piece is so lyrical. The
title has to do with the free form of the piece, but it was also a kind of
homage to Stokowski/Disney’s wonderful film. When I wrote Fantasia I had not
yet started to work with Stokowski in New York (that would come eighteen months
later), but he had already premièred two of my works.

During my first years with Stokowski’s American Symphony
Orchestra in New York I was still writing music regularly, mostly encouraged by
him and some of his best musicians. Stokowski had assembled an orchestra with
some of the best free-lance virtuoso musicians in the New York area. Two of the
star performers were Paul Price, who commissioned my Symphony for Percussion
for his Manhattan Percussion Ensemble, and Davis Shulman, who commissioned a
work for trombone and strings. The Variations on a Theme from Childhood (1963)
can be performed on trombone or bassoon. It requires a virtuoso of great
technique. The strings are also stretched to the limits, with extremely high
writing.

I received a commission from the American Accordionists
Association to write a work for accordion and chamber orchestra, the
Passacaglia and Perpetuum Mobile, for accordion and chamber orchestra (1966).
The instrument was entirely foreign to me, but Elsie Bennett, longtime
president of the organization, and the brains behind their massive
commissioning series, lent me an accordion, which I studied for weeks. It was a
great challenge, because the chords provided by the buttons on the left side of
the instrument were ready-set, giving the composer very little freedom for
tonal imagination and variety. The instrument has since then been improved, and
composers today do not have that problem. I gave the commissioning organization
a bonus, a piece for solo accordion, which I wrote at the same time.

As life grew busier with conducting tours and the direction
of international festivals, I saw my composing time brought to a halt. What
broke the ice, some fifteen years after my last works, was a combination of
circumstances. For my festival in Miami I had commissioned Elliott Carter to
write his Fourth String Quartet which we premièred together with new works by
many other composers. In 1987 I had ten prominent composers write new works
especially for Lucas Drew, one of the foremost double-bass virtuosos in
America. He insisted, however, that I add my own contribution to the list. My
small contribution to Lucas Drew’s series of commissions was George &
Muriel (1986), for the unusual ensemble of double-bass, double-bass choir, and
wordless off-stage chorus. I found that writing this short piece, after so many
years, was as if I had never stopped composing, and it encouraged me to
continue. At that time, my close friends George and Muriel Marek were about to
celebrate their sixtieth wedding anniversary and I could not think of a more
personal gift for them than a new composition.

This work does not intend to be in any way a portrait of the
Mareks. It is a work I may have written anyway. The music reflects what was on
my mind at that moment, my most intimate thoughts, and as such it is my humble
but deeply felt homage to George and Muriel Marek.

When I first met this wonderful, colorful couple, Dorothy
and Carmine, I was in the midst of organizing Festival Miami. My composing time
had been reduced to the wishful thinking of ideas, with no time left for
writing them down. Every moment was taken up by organizational work for the new
festival and guest conducting all over the world. This little essay, Dorothy
& Carmine! for flute and strings (1991), written to celebrate the marriage
of longtime Miami friends Dorothy Traficante and Carmine Vlachos, is meant as a
wedding gift rather than a musical picture. I experimented with sonorities by
paring strings with two wandering flutes, one of which appears from nowhere in
the audience, almost as a dancer who is sometimes invited to join the stage
proceedings. The flutist is sitting in the audience unbeknown to the public,
and sometime towards the end of this puzzling (to me as well) piece, the
flutist seems to get excited or inspired by the happenings onstage and starts
playing. By the time the public becomes aware that an ‘intruder’ is daring to
interrupt the concert, the flutist stands and starts to walk toward the stage,
all the while playing faster and faster until reaching the usual soloist spot
on the stage next to the conductor. After a brief climax, the flutist exits
slowly to the back-stage area, and can still be heard repeating a haunting
drone as the orchestra comments with background sounds. Finally, the sound of
the flute can still be heard, but magically, this time the sound comes from the
back of the auditorium (or the balcony), as a second flutist echoes the dying
notes of the first flute. Do not try to read a meaning behind the notes here
(nor in the other essay of this series). Each listener is welcome to make up
his own story line, if it helps in enjoyment of the music.

I completely surprised myself when writing Symphony No. 3,
Mystical – Symphonie Mystique (2003), in being able to complete it in a week.
Part of the rush was the imminent recording deadline, but it came out of my pen
as if I was just transcribing something that had always been in my memory.
Later I was reminded of a statement by my friend Einojuhani Rautavaara: “music
exists in some other plateau, and we composers merely write it down.” When he
and I shared Aaron Copland’s composition class at Tanglewood in 1956, we struck
an immediate friendship.

My previous two symphonies are completely different in every
respect. The first, also written in the heat of the moment during the summer of
1956, shortly after my arrival in America, was in an extended one movement. It
seemed to me at the time that the multiple-movement form no longer applied,
since mood and speeds now changed freely within each movement, and there was no
need for the separation into independent pieces. No one was more surprised than
I was when Leopold Stokowski announced he was going to conduct it with his
orchestra in Houston, as a last minute replacement for the première of the
Charles Ives’ Fourth Symphony.

The Second Symphony, Partita, is an extensive four-movement
work, composed during my years in Minneapolis, while studying conducting with
Antal Dorati. This work took several months to complete. It was my first
recorded composition (Whitney and the Louisville Orchestra), and it provided me
with a US conducting début. In 1960 Howard Mitchell decided to include it in
the subscription series of the National Symphony Orchestra, and he invited me
to conduct it.

The Third Symphony is in the traditional four-movement format,
but here the tradition ends. The opening is a rather brash, aggressive moto
perpetuo, the only fast movement in the work, with obsessive, repeated rhythms.
The Slavic-sounding melody of the second subject reappears throughout the other
movements in several disguises, not necessarily as a leitmotiv, but as a memory
of things past. The opening is in the simple a-b-a format, while the rest of
the movements are quite rhapsodic. The second movement opens with a long cello
line, which builds a dark climate using the minimal diatonic interval, a
semitone, sometime broken across octaves. A haunting high violin line
intercedes, like a voice from afar. It leads to succeeding interludes that have
a feeling of unresolved conflict, ending quietly and questioningly. The third
movement is also a fantasy or rhapsody like the previous one, but very
different in character. It opens quietly with the second violins, soon joined
by the violas, and followed by anxious, anguished sounds. It is eventually
interrupted by a sad, cryptic waltz. This waltz keeps returning obsessively,
over and over. Eventually it gives up, and the movement ends in resignation.
The finale is perhaps the main reason for the subtitle. After a short
introduction, again based on the second motive of the first movement, it
changes character, leading to a repeated drone, like a passacaglia, serving as
the backdrop for a distant voice, a disembodied sound, wordless and mystical.
Echoes of that same recurrent second motive from the first movement make their
final ghostly appearances, hidden under the string ostinato. It seems to have
an outer- worldly character.